The men at the ticker tape muttered and growled over news of
a dam break back east, covering a town in thirty feet of water, killing thousands. The bartender asked if I wanted another for my son and myself.
I began: “He’s not my—”
“Dad needs another,” Hughie broke in, grinning, then said to me: “Drink it down, Dad. I have to tell you something.”
Off in her high room, that instant, my sister was being born. I am glad to report that no one screamed except the newborn girl and nothing was smothered except a mother’s worry; red gleaming Mina was lifted into the world gulping like a lungfish, coughing, and then as the cord was severed and she was made as lonely as any of us, she sang out and Mother could see through the green mist of the chloroform pills that here was her baby. Here was a thing that would grow old; here was a thing that would turn beautiful and lose that beauty, that would inherit the grace but also the bad ear and flawed figure of her mother, that would smile too much and squint too often and spend the last decades of her life creaming away the wrinkles made in youth until she finally gave up and wore a collar of pearls to hide a wattle; here was the ordinary sadness of the world.
And I myself was growing a little older as I listened to Hughie’s story. What he told me loosed a loneliness I had not expected. Hughie sat all in black, a grave man telling a grave thing, pausing only to accept his steam ale and to blow the foam from the top, turning back to me with the soft eyes of a temple cat. “Don’t be angry,” he kept insisting, tapping his nail on the bar just below a carved insanity of hearts and thorned initials. “It’s nothing to me, I swear, it’s nothing.” From above, the smoke-trail of paper floated down into the basket, as if returning to its burning source, as if something other than myself were running backwards in the world. But nothing else does; the world falls forward when it falls apart.
They were a few brief words. A cluster of glass. You see, while
I was romping with Mrs. Levy in the corner garden, my Alice had fallen in love. Simply, brutally, in love. With whom? With Hughie, of course. Who else?
Doctors, an update:
I have survived an examination just this afternoon. I avoid physicians as much as I can, and especially since I have become a little boy, but the thunderstorm of the other night has given me a sore throat. I tried to hide it with lozenges and smiles, but swallowing Mrs. Ramsey’s cooking has gone from a small torture to an impossibility. All I can do is moan and grimace. The dog is terrified of me. And you, Sammy, have been teasing me mercilessly. So I have been taken to a little bungalow in the nice part of town, a windowless place with movie posters and a spool of gauze to play with. Mrs. Ramsey, that kind woman, bathed me in her concern, gave me a dry kiss, and said she would be back. So for almost an hour it was just me and the gauze and the movie-poster nurse. I have memorized the snowy battlements of her cap.
Dr. Harper turned out to be a jokey fellow with the stainedwood look of a Hollywood leading man. He stared into my throat and squinted for a while before he spoke to me.
“You don’t feel well?”
“I’m fine. It’s a sore throat.”
He shook his head and took some notes. “It isn’t. It’s something very different. I’ve never seen anything like it.” A little laugh.
Was it possible? That half a century of doctors, who had bled me, blistered me, purged, sweated, and electrocuted me, could not discover what this man caught in an instant? I have withstood Rushians and Thomsonians, Grahamites and Fletcherizers and Freudians—so had I become an old lake bass that, lazy with slipping so many barbed nooses, gets landed by a schoolboy? I am an
old man; I do not understand the world as it is, and it seems entirely possible that the new century has found an X, Y, or Z ray to sound out a man like me. Still, in this small hamlet on the plains? I calmed my impulse to confess; I sat still as a child.
“I need some measurements, old man,” he said, smiling mysteriously.
I shivered, then he took my height, my weight, the length of various bones, peered into my ears and eyes and listened thoughtfully to the off-key radio of my heart. I noted the numbers myself, but knew he could not tell that I had shrunk two inches in the past year, lost a proportional amount of weight, and now owned only a tight snail-wad of genitals. I lied about my medical history, giving myself an infant hernia operation, chronic bronchitis, and a handful of allergies, just to handicap his game. Throughout, he tried to interest me in little jokes, but I was elsewhere, floating above, terrified that my choking swallow was that clue, in boys’ detective stories, that always reveals our young hero to his foe.
“It’s all very clear, old man. Let’s find your mom and dad.”
“She isn’t my mother. And my dad’s dead.”
“Oh,” he said, startled for the first time.
“What are you going to tell her?”
He grinned and tousled my hair. “I’m going to tell her everything about you.”
They spent a good ten minutes in his office while I waited in the outer room again, dead or dying of something, thinking how to interrupt their conference, perhaps counterfeit a yellow fever attack, and realizing with a dull laugh that I was showing my age after all: the disease had been wiped out by 1900. That very moment, I heard the movie-reel sound of adult laughter in the hallway and there they emerged, my Mrs. Ramsey looking so young, amused, and aglow. I was handed a green candy wrapped in paper; Mrs. Ramsey wrote down the name of a novel she recommended; Dr. Harper took the note, then gave a wink and a serious
wave before departing again; and before I knew it we were out into the always-fresh sun of my new hometown. I put the candy in my pocket beside the pills I had carefully pilfered from the exam room. Then she told me my lot.
With men like Dr. Harper around, I will be forever safe. It turns out I showed early stages of what doctors call parotitis. That is to say: the mumps. A child’s disease. If the quack proves to be right, I have swollen glands to look forward to and days of fever in my bedroom. But he is certain to be wrong. Have you ever heard of mumps in a man of nearly sixty?
Mrs. Ramsey took me to the drugstore and bought me a chocolate bar, a pair of roller skates and a silver toy army pistol much like one Hughie used to own. For you, Sammy, she bought the Ruf-Nek chewing gum you love. For herself, she browsed the cosmetics aisle and laughed and giggled over the potions before choosing an erotic shade of lipstick and two kinds of eyebrow pencil. She examined the scents, frowning, and finally learned from a pink-eyed clerk that her favorite cologne had gone out of style and had to be specially ordered. I asked her what it was. “Rediviva,” Mrs. Ramsey replied with a sigh. I produced the doctor’s prescription, which I had enhanced with my own forgery, and she took it dutifully. Then it was an easy trip to the pharmacy counter, where this little soldier became the proud owner of potassium, quinine, and a lovely blue bottle of morphine. We live in a golden age.
It was almost a week before I had him break her heart. Your heart, Alice, your bruised-peach of a heart. I did not do it out of spite; I did it because it was absolutely necessary. Now, looking back, it would have been far wiser to have Hughie run into her arms and bedevil her with cheap diamonds and carnations, and whisper
sticky things into her ears; nothing turns a girl like an amateur’s heart. She would have dropped him in a fortnight, I think, and not because she was stupid or fickle, but because sometimes we are frightened when the bomb we’re planting goes off in our own hands. And if I had done this, what would have come of it? She would have hated Hughie, and probably me through association; she would have fallen for the next handsome boy she saw, at one of those dances she loathed attending, gone out with him, and, finding herself waiting on a foggy corner one afternoon, her heart would have been broken after all. At least this way it was managed by someone who cared.
Hughie agreed to do just as I said. He was to meet her at the Conservatory of Flowers, where she had taken to visiting him after school, and break her little heart with the sharp crack one employs to split a geode. He was to be gentle but firm and leave no tatters of love hanging in her chest; she was to be cleansed of this ridiculous sensation and thus find herself open to, even grateful for, the love of an apparently older, more considerate man. Hughie wondered at the plan; he thought it was remarkably cruel to such a pretty girl. “Pretty?” I asked, suspicious. “Did you … did you do something to make her feel this way?” He denied it and agreed to the task. At first I was going to hide behind a fern to watch my bit of theater, but he said this would make him nervous and he’d probably foul it up. So I was sent home and there I waited for word from Hughie that he’d cleared the brush for my arrival. I sat in the parlor and tried unsuccessfully to read; I set out a card game for myself but kept losing. I ended up finding one of my father’s whatnots—a monkey’s head encased in glass—and stared at it for over an hour, finding in its grotesquery a brief escape from my own.
At four o’clock, the front doorbell rang and I heard Maggie speaking to someone in the hall. I had told her I would be in for anyone except those calling on my mother. Presently there was a
knock at the parlor door: Maggie, telling me there was urgent news. I waved my hand and poured a glass of whiskey for myself and one for Hughie. I steadied myself, looked out the window to where two squirrels were at war. I heard a wretched voice:
“Mr. Tivoli, I need your advice.”
It was Alice.
We have no heart at seventeen. We think we do; we think we have been cursed with a holy, bloated thing that twitches at the name we adore, but it is not a heart because though it will forfeit anything in the world—the mind, the body, the future, even the last lonely hour it has—it will not sacrifice itself. It is not a heart, at seventeen. It is a fat queen murmuring in her hive. I wish I’d had it in me, when Alice stepped into the room looking so drowned and desperate, when she fell to her knees and sobbed so hotly into the wool of my pants, to send her back to Hughie. To stroke her hair (though I did that) and cup her chin in my rough hand (that too) and tell her he would kiss her in an instant; he was a boy, after all, and she was a thicket of beauty. To say “He’ll love you” and “There are ways” and turn into the tilted light of the room as she wiped her face and blinked and readied herself for another battle. To let her go. But there was no heart in me. When do we grow one? Twenty, thirty years after we need it?
Instead, I looked at the head shuddering on my knees; I stared at the pale furrow between her braids as if searching for the source of a lost river. I waited until it was time to touch her, and then I did, and she did not shake my arm from her shoulder or my hand from her head but emptied herself even more into my lap. Without knowing it, she and I were conjuring her father, and we each played our parts—Alice weeping unashamedly, Mr. Tivoli hushing and shushing her—until her sniffs and gasps meant it was almost over.
She began to speak: “It’s Hughie, Mr. Tivoli.” I slipped my finger into the loop of her hair ribbon.
“I know,” I said, then added too silently for her to hear: “Call me Max.”
“He was a monster, a monster, he said …”
“What did he say?” With a tug from my finger, her ribbon fell out of its knot; I shivered; she did not notice.
“He said …he said he wanted us to be friendly. Idiot. He said he didn’t want to spoil a sweet moment.”
I sipped my whiskey nervously. Hughie had improvised from the script; he had treated my Alice like any girl he met on the street. “Where were you?” I asked quietly, wondering what else he had added.
She sniffed and sat back, letting my hand fall from her; the spell was undone. “It was at the Victoria Regina, like always. I always meet him there. He can usually get away for a minute and it’s quiet there and you can just stare at the lilies. I was …I thought I’d be brave and ask him when he was going to take me out. And he said …oh, he said I was just fourteen. And that he wasn’t interested in girls like me. At fourteen. Not that way. Girls like me? Are there really other girls like me?”
This was a little off the script, but close. I imagined Hughie getting a little stage fright, there in his uniform beside the enormous lily pads, and whispering whatever came into his head; possibly, he was truer than I’d intended. “What else?”
Some memory cut her and she winced in grief. “He said he loved me like a sister. I’m not an idiot, Mr. Tivoli.”
“Max. You’re not, no, no, Alice …”
“I know what he was saying. He was saying he can’t ever love me. Wasn’t he? Or … was he maybe …”
“No, no, Alice, sit here beside me …”
“I don’t understand,” she murmured.
I touched her shoulder again. Then I made a mistake: “Just forget him, Alice.”
She pulled away and I saw that she hated me. It happened so quickly; one minute I was an understanding friend, a father almost, and then the next I was an old man who knew nothing of love, nothing of passion, a man who could offer only his own sad poison. But to see that hatred in her eyes; it felt as if she was gone forever and no plan of mine would ever bring her back. Hughie might wreck her heart a hundred times, but if I told my Alice to forget him, to find a sweet and loving boy nearby (perhaps nearer than she ever imagined), she would send me out of her life. She would turn again into the sullen downstairs girl who never thought of me. Those eyes, threaded with hate like opals, burning off the tears; I would have done anything to change them. So I sputtered as she looked on. And then I discovered what she had come to hear: